Founder and Editor of The Lanchester Review. Previous or occasional contributor to Telegraph Blogs, Comment is Free, The First Post/The Week, Harry's Place, New Directions, The Brussels Journal, The London Progressive Journal, Labour Uncut, The American Conservative and Russia Today (RT). Available for work via davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, all lower case.

Friday, 1 February 2013

Easily Replaced

As, together with "unimpressive", Nigel Lawson today describes the City boys who keep threatening to leave the country if they do not get their own way. He also calls for the whole of RBS to be nationalised, so as to force it to lend to business. That's right. Nigel Lawson.

But he is still only halfway there. Investment banking and retail banking should be split completely.
All of the banks should be
turned into mutual building societies, ironclad as such by statute, the same Statute Law that already forbids building societies from engaging in investment banking.

Apart, that is, from the public stakes in HBOS and RBS, which should indeed be increased to 100 per cent. Those are
permanent, non-negotiable safeguards of the Union, as public ownership
always is.
Therefore, the profits from each of those stakes should be
divided equally among all the households in the United Kingdom.

8 comments:

That's funny, when I saw Maurice Glasman on Jeremy Paxman he was arguing nationalisation was a terrible model of running an economy which meant that "clever people with PPE's from oxford, sitting in Whitehall...pull all the levers of power" while ordinary folks are disenfranchised.

He was even saying Labour's 1945 model of nationalisation was a failure.

He almost sounded like a conservative, for a moment.

But he didn't advance the best argument against state ownership (of welfare, of healthcare etc).

That it's the route to tyranny.

We see it in the US already-national healthcare means Catholic Universities, hospitals and businesses forced to dole out free contraception by federal mandate.

Small businesses forced to switch their employees to part-time or pay fines.

They shouldn't complain-if you vote for tyranny, that is what you will get.

The first been seem top have been resolved within the last few hours. People are hailing a miracle, but the whole thing was entirely predictable.

I am not a "fan", of Maurice or anyone else. He would laugh uproariously at the suggestion. As for nationalisation, even Nigel Lawson now supports it of a bank, and dismisses the banker boys with contempt.

By all means go into the 2015 Election promising to abolish the NHS. You will be doing so, anyway, since the views of you party's leading members are very much a matter of record. Welcome to proper scrutiny. You wanted the big time. Here it is.

What was "entirely predictable" was that, once they nationalised healthcare,the Left would use its power to impose its prejudices on the masses.

It'll happen again, now they've opened the door to it.

In Britain, we have a health service that is used as a political weapon by Labour. A health service that provides free abortions and free sex-change ops, but won't provide 'free' drugs for unfashionable forms of cancer (those that affect the elderly, specifically men etc) only the headline-grabbing types (breast cancer etc).

Nationalisation of medicine is the politicisation of medicine.

The Catholic Church will soon learn that.

Their enemies in the political Left now have power over people's health-and will use that as a tool of oppression.

Britain had the NHS for a generation before legalised abortion, and it was Thatcher who legalised it up to birth.

It was always pure scaremongering that ObamaCare involved federally funded abortion. On the contrary, it specifically precluded it. And now the contraceptive mandate has turned out to have been a lie as well. As we always knew.

Do go into the General Election promising that UKIP will abolish the NHS, though.

Not at all. 12-week time limits and outright bans are the norm in the socialised healthcare systems of Western Europe, and the fact that healthcare is delivered at public expense is an argument routinely deployed to keep things that way.

It is America that has had abortion on demand at every stage of pregnancy for 40 years and counting, in no small measure due to the subsequent judicial appointments by Ronald Reagan, who had previously legalised abortion in California.

There is no suggestion that the ban on federal funding of abortion in America will ever be lifted; even people who want it to be bemoan, but cannot dispute, the fact that it is never going to happen. A move to the full federal funding of universal healthcare would thus render abortion effectively impossible. As in much of Europe, in fact.

About Me

Founder, Proprietor, Publisher and Editor of The Lanchester Review since 2013. Founder, Proprietor (for now), Publisher (for now) and Editor-in-Chief of Lanchester Books since 2014. Charity volunteer and administrator since 1994. Freelance journalist since 1996. Supply teacher and market research worker from 2002 until prevented by disability. Member of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham since 2006. Preventing the University of Durham’s undergraduates’ degrees from getting the way of their education since 2000.
Elected Parish Councillor from the age of 21 until I stood down voluntarily in 2013. During that time, Lanchester was among the first in the country to secure power of wellbeing, power of general competence, and Quality Parish Council Status.
At 21, I began eight years as a governor of a primary school which, at the time of my appointment, still had the same Headteacher as when I had been a pupil there. Three weeks short of 22, I found myself in the same position when I began eight years as a governor of a comprehensive school.
Since May 2013, a member of the Community Panel advising Durham’s Police and Crime Commissioner.